Well, hello there panda fans. Have you ever sat there in awe of a game, after playing it for hours and hours, shirking all other responsibilities just to get 15 more minutes with the wonderous digital adventure before you?

Have you also ever found yourself asking, “How did they come up with this!?”

You (may or) may not already know that it IS indeed possible for a “normie” like yourself to create your own video game with relative ease.

Thanks to GameMaker Studio.

Screen cap of Overquill in gamemaker (TBD image)

The current development for Overquill is being done with GameMaker Studio 2. Over the years there’s been several different versions of GameMaker, with several different pros and cons depending on which you have.

One of the best things about the tool is how easy it is to use with its ability to have drag and drop asset creation, easy to organize mapping, and a full library of pre-coded actions, motions, etc. Given our fearless leader's game design degree from RIT, where he was introduced to GameMaker 8, the doors were opened for the fires of inspiration to grow legs and turn into something real.

For the most part, the gaming industry presents itself as an immense, unobtainable dream unless you have an enormous amount of funding as well as an arsenal of expensive software and staff to create it. GameMaker breaks down all of those barriers and has shifted the definition of what a quality game is. Strong story arcs, fierce character development, and deeper meaning is the result of this change, and a lesser focus on fancy graphics, and compromising artistic intents in order to get funding.

[It] takes care of a lot of heavy lifting in terms of graphics, services, and other backend things,” Travis says. “It also integrates well with Bitbucket and Jira so you can collaborate well online with other people.

One of his favorite games, Undertale, was actually created with GameMaker. Knowing that a quality game like that could be created with a tool like GameMaker, the idea of endless possibilities created the seed of Overquill.

For our PandaShock team, GameMaker allows for lean resourcing and easy collaboration. You could in theory have one dev, and one designer working together to create a high-quality game with relative ease. With the heavy lifting being done by the software, the team could focus more attention on the Overquill story arcs, characters, and UI.

The developer and designer in this case can just layout the game and make the front end logic as they wish.

— Travis Miller

While his start was strictly directed towards the front-end art of gaming, his tone quickly changed after one class changed his mind and code became a bigger and bigger part of his life.

Thanks to GameMaker, more and more games are being developed, with better stories, better characters, and fewer irrelevant flash, while also staying within a very reasonable budget. Stay tuned on more developments on our current work in progress using GameMaker!